A slow start this morning after a big day yesterday. It was our first go at entering the Lowaters Nursery (Garden Beauty) 5-a-side football tournament followed by a night out at a local charity ball. Considering I was still up after 10.30 and the fluid intake was above average my head feels fine unfortunately the rest of my body has let me down.

The only way I could make it into the team was to play in goal as we had plenty of volunteers to play on the pitch but I underestimated the effort involved in repeatedly lying horizontal between a couple of posts. Actually the lying horizontal bit was ok it was the getting down and back up again that did me in. My thighs are very stiff and sore, I’ve got carpet burns and bruises on knees, elbows and hips and one wrist doesn’t work anymore. I was like the six-million-dollar-man in the first game, if anyone remembers that far back, everything I did was in slow motion but unfortunately the shots weren’t. A pint of Guinness and a sausage and bacon roll put that right and things did improve in the later games, in fact much to our surprise we won with a 100% record through the whole day. We had one or two very useful players but the thing that swung it was the team work, if we used everyone together it worked fantastically well most of the time and the occasional cock-ups were soon forgotten. It was a perfect sunny autumn day for it and Lowaters did a great job organising it and raising valuable funds for the Greenfingers charity, so well done them. I had hoped a bit of jigging about in the evening would help stretch things out but I fear the only thing really stretched was the waistband. Hopefully things generally will have loosened up a bit by tomorrow and I can start moving around again without quite as many old person’s moans and groans.

2012 is creeping up very quickly and I saw this week that they have already announced the Great Britain sailing team. I don’t know much about sailing but I hear that Ben Ainsley has made it into his fourth Olympics which is a great achievement especially when you think of all the time he spends cooking and hosting Ready Steady Cook.

Back on the nursery, the herbaceous bulbs have just arrived so that means another last few days potting and we will be done for 2012. All the seasonal helpers have gone back to college or other jobs now and we are back to our core backbone of hardworking regulars. That must mean those days are returning when we treasure every penny that comes in and dread each that slips out as the cash-flow issues build through winter until the spring income starts again in a few months time. At least we can see how much better the nursery, stock and business look at this point in comparison to other recent years, real progress and excitement for the coming seasons.

Hopefully the wind keeps the turbines turning over the next few months which should give us a handy boost to the autumn and winter income, it is not quite like printing money but it does provide a regular bonus. On top of that we will have a whole winters benefit of the extra house insulation we put in last winter which will save several more hundreds of pounds. Slowly, slowly catchee monkey.

Eco News

I went to a PLATO Sustain conference last week which was very good but rather disappointingly attended, lots of up to date sustainability info and I learnt a bit about effective business governance. Sounds very dull but was actually quite inspiring. One thing an effective company board can do is take a step back from the everyday fire-fighting that tends to dominate general management in challenging times and take a look at longer term strategy. This can cut back on the fire-fighting which is an obvious immediate bonus and also identify opportunities or approaching challenges in the coming years, sustainability being one of those. Then the very next day we had a sustainability issue reappear in conversation with our plant health inspector. This is something we have started addressing quietly ourselves over the last couple of years and may become a much bigger issue in the coming years for the whole horticultural industry. The advantages of local purchasing of stock is likely to become more obvious as transport costs (in £’s as well as carbon) continue to escalate. But there may be a more urgent issue that could create a real strategic challenge for plant growers and retailers and that is the increasing spread of non-native pests and diseases. One pest we have had come onto the quarantined part of our nursery on imported cuttings is the tobacco whitefly. It is known to carry 152 seriously harmful plant viruses that can devastate commercial food crops and is already seriously affecting production abroad of all sorts of crops. At present it is a notifiable disease in the UK and is being stopped from spreading by effective monitoring and control by importing nurseries (us) and the plant inspectorate. Although this has worked so far there is the possibility that regular offenders (propagation nurseries abroad) could be banned from sending stock to the UK. This could produce sudden serious loss of supply and shortages and in the future could result in a lot more restrictions of plant movements between countries and even within countries. In the longer term there are even fears of plant movement restrictions within the UK, resulting effectively in forced local growing and purchasing. Something to think about for all you buyers and growers out there.

Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries